Angel’s Doll (Thunder Bastards MC: Seattle #4)

Chapter 1

DOLL

The lawyer says recorded for the fourth time, and the fourth time is the one that lands. He’s a senior partner who doesn’t mind repeating himself. Neither would I, at his hourly rate.

My uncle stands at the head of the long glass table, tie pulled loose, a fan of title printouts in front of him like a hand of cards he already knows is dead.

“It’s recorded, Mr. Hale,” he says again. “It’s permanent. The easements run with the land. No commercial development on that parcel. Not now, not in ten years. Not ever.”

My uncle keeps finding new ways to ask the same question, and the lawyer keeps handing him the same answer. He’s been doing that for a week now, ever since he learned the easements were filed and he started looking for a way around the word permanent.

Can we challenge the filing? No. Buy out the conservancy? You don’t buy out of a conservation easement. That’s the whole point of one.

I stand against the wall by the credenza where I’ve stood through a hundred meetings.

Close enough to be useful, far enough away not to exist. This is the good conference room, the one Halcyon uses for investors: glass on every side, thirty-two floors up, the Sound gone flat and gray behind everyone’s panic.

Down the hall a printer spits out fresh copies of the title report, as if new ones might say what the first didn’t.

Victor refreshes the county portal over and over. The public record cannot un-record itself between clicks. He usually doesn’t touch a keyboard, especially not during meetings. He has people like me for that. But today he’s doing it himself, fast.

“Tell me how,” he says.

I tune out the answer. The how doesn’t matter. The outcome is all that’s left in the room. It’s done, it’s permanent, and the coastline meant to be the best thing Victor Hale ever dreamt of building can never become what Victor promised it would be.

He’s angry.

I grew up under his anger. It doesn’t scare me anymore.

But there’s more. It takes me a second to identify it on him.

It’s fear.

And here’s what I hate: the fear jumps from him to me before I can stop it. Not for the project. Not for him. For me.

If Halcyon goes under, so does he, and I’ll lose the studio where I live, the car I drive, the phone I use.

Everything he holds over me, he also holds up against me. I should want him to lose. I would be free. But he’s the devil I know.

His phone lights up. He turns it over without a glance.

He moves to the window and drops his voice. Marianne Voss follows him. She’s his in-house counsel, the witch who makes his most aggressive moves come out technically clean. They put their backs to the room.

I’m at the credenza, closer than they think, refilling water nobody’s drinking.

“The money’s already spent. I used it to buy all the land,” Victor says, low. “He’s coming over. What do I tell him?”

“That it’s the cost of doing business.” Voss shrugs. “Nobody wins them all. He’ll have to take the loss.”

“He doesn’t take losses.” Victor’s voice drops further. “You know what he is, Marianne. You know what people like him do to those who come up short.”

She says a few more words I don’t catch. Then she turns and speaks up.

“Thank you,” she says to the outside counsel. “We got it. We’re done here.”

The senior partner packs his briefcase and I walk him to the elevator.

In the foyer, Victor’s next appointment is already waiting. He’s early.

Ian Durey.

When I first saw the name on my uncle’s calendar, I smiled. My dad loved a singer called almost like that. He used to play his songs in the car, both of us shouting the choruses wrong. One letter off. Close enough to make me eight years old again, windows down, world safe.

The man waiting in the foyer doesn’t smile.

He’s somewhere past fifty, gone soft in the middle, built like a man who used to do his own collecting before other men started doing it for him.

He wears a fancy suit that still can’t make him look like a businessman.

He has mob written all over him, and he scares the hell out of me.

“Miss Hale.” He stands when the elevator doors close behind the senior partner. “I assume he’s available now. I’ll see myself up. I know the way.”

“I’ll take you,” I say, because my uncle would have my head if I let him roam around the offices alone.

In the corridor he stays half a step behind me, a draft on the nape of my neck the whole way.

Voss is gone when we’re back in the conference room. Whatever gets said in here now, my uncle doesn’t want it said in front of anyone who’s an officer of the court.

He doesn’t mind if it’s said in front of me, though. Or he doesn’t care. I’ve never worked out which is worse.

“Ian.” Victor comes around the table with his hand out and his voice dialed to the register he uses for investors. “I take it by now, you’ve heard.”

“I’ve heard.” Durey ignores the hand. He takes a chair instead, unbuttons his jacket, and looks around the room like a man pricing the furniture. “Tell me anyway. I like to hear it from the man who owes me.”

I move to the sideboard and pour two glasses. My hands know the routine even when the rest of me wants to be anywhere else. Neither of them tells me to leave. To Victor, I’m furniture. Apparently to Durey too.

Victor tells it straight, which is how I know how frightened he is. Two plots of land in the middle of the project are now completely protected. The project is dead.

“So,” Durey says when it’s finished. “My money.”

“It’s in the land.” Victor spreads his hands.

“All of it. That was the structure. You knew the structure. We bought well, below market for most of it. As soon as I sell the parcels, you’ll be made whole, maybe better than whole.

But it’s going to take a minute. Land like this doesn’t move in a week. Two months. Maybe six for …”

“Six months.” Durey repeats it the way he’d repeat a joke he didn’t find funny. “This is not acceptable. Not for me and not for my cousins.” He picks up the glass now, turns it, sets it down without drinking. “You want six months of my patience. Patience is expensive. Mine especially.”

“Six months is a worst-case scenario,” Victor says. “The first parcels could close in ninety days if …”

“One week.”

Nobody speaks.

“You’ll show me progress in one week,” Durey says. “A signed sale. A wire. Blood from a stone, I don’t care which. And in the meantime, I hold collateral. This is how it’s done between serious people. You hand over what you can’t afford to lose.”

Victor’s eyes go to the renderings on the wall, then to the head of the table, then to me.

I watch it happen. I watch my uncle look at me. Durey follows the look. He smiles.

“Your darling niece,” he says.

Say no. The words are so loud in my head I’m certain both of them can hear. Say it’s absurd. Say she’s family. Say anything at all.

My uncle looks at the printouts on the table. He straightens one so its edge lines up with the glass.

“She’ll be treated well,” Durey says, to him, not to me. Nobody in this room has said one word to me. “She’ll have her own room. Better view than the one over your garage, I’d imagine. And in a week, when you’ve shown me what you need to show me, she comes home and none of us mentions it again.”

“A week,” Victor says.

That’s it. That’s the whole negotiation for me. Two words, and he still hasn’t met my eyes.

“Get your coat, Miss Hale,” Durey says, rising, buttoning the jacket. “My car’s downstairs.”

And here is the part I’ll hate myself for later. I obey. The week I moved into my uncle’s house, I was a stupid teenager throwing tantrums to deal with my grief and I refused to wear the dress he’d picked for my parents’ funeral. My winter coat disappeared for a month. I learned.

I walk to the closet by the assistants’ station and take my coat off the hook, quick and quiet. My phone stays on my desk. Company phone. My bag stays in my drawer. Company card in it, company keys. Nothing in my entire life belongs to me.

I follow the mobster to the elevator with the one thing in the building I can call mine, my driver license in my back pocket.

Durey stands too close on the ride down. Not touching but still too close.

“Your uncle told me once you keep his whole life running,” he says, watching the floor numbers fall. “Calendar, files, all of it. Good. You’ll be useful as well as decorative.”

I say nothing. Thirty-two floors of nothing.

The doors open on the lobby. Marble, glass, the security desk. The day guard looks up at me and I almost do it. Almost mouth help. But what would I say? My uncle sent me. So far, no crime has been committed.

What the guard sees is a girl in a good coat walking out with one of her uncle’s business associates. Nothing to be alarmed about.

Through the doors, rain that can’t commit, bus brakes, cigarette smoke drifting from the valet stand. Across the street, a big man in a black leather jacket watches the building and frowns. He looks dangerous. Today, everything does.

Durey’s limousine is double-parked in front of the building, hazards blinking. Cars like his never get tickets.

The driver climbs out. Big through the shoulders, jacket loose over a bulge at his hip. He rounds the hood to open the door for us. Durey’s eyes are on the traffic. The driver’s body is half turned. Between them, ten feet of open sidewalk and the door waiting for me.

A week, they said.

No phone. No wallet. No account with my name on it. Nobody besides my uncle who’d notice if I was gone for good. If Durey’s week becomes forever, I won’t exist anywhere except in my uncle’s files.

I run.